September Castle Page 5

  ‘No wanking?’

  ‘No wanking – except a little pretending, to amuse Ptoly. He’s really quite right. If you don’t come you don’t get tired of each other, and if you’re living in the same house it’s very important you shouldn’t. What about you and Canty?’

  ‘Canty’s taught me to toss him off the way his study fag did. Making a mess, he calls it. “Canty wants to make a mess on Baby’s tum tum,” he says – but only about once in six months, so I don’t think he’ll get tired of that in a hurry.’

  ‘What’s in it for you?’

  ‘He’s very grateful and very loving…but he won’t actually do anything for me, except undress me and kiss me goodnight. That’s it, sweetheart. Not too hard. Just waggle.’

  ‘You can put yours in further if you like. Ooooh. Do you think Canty and Ptoly are really happy about us. I mean…about this.’

  ‘Of course they are,’ Baby said. ‘They both love us very much and they both want us to enjoy ourselves. For reasons of their own they limit what they do with us, but of course they understand that a girl needs a real throberama from time to time.’

  ‘Suppose a girl wanted a real throberama with other men?’

  ‘That might be a little difficult. Myself, I think we’re very lucky as we are. Imagine the ghastliness of having a lover – some boring and conceited stockbroker with smelly feet.’

  ‘One might do better than that,’ Jo-Jo said.

  ‘And one might do even worse. One might get carried away and start carrying on with a jockey or a bruiser or a journalist or something foul like that.’

  ‘One could always get rid of him.’

  ‘Not so easy sometimes, cherry pie. People will cling. Promise you’ll never cling. And I’ll promise you,’ said Baby.

  ‘I’ll never cling, darling. Would you like me to show you something really special?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a new trick of Ptoly’s. We’ll have to take our fingers out, so that I can get off the bed and find the kit.’

  ‘What kit?’

  ‘The bicycle pump,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘Ah… Now, what I do is, I screw on the flex, like this, and then I pop the other end of the flex into your thing –’

  ‘Which thing?’

  ‘Front thing this time, darling. Just feed it in…that’s right… and now I start pumping.’

  ‘Zow-eeee,’ said Baby after the first few strokes. ‘What happens when Ptoly does this to you? How come you don’t come?’

  ‘Ptoly’s very clever at knowing when it’s near. So he stops. Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Baby, ‘because I want you to get on the bed again… so that we can both be very close…darling Jo-Jo…’

  ‘Darling Baby…’

  ‘Very, very close…and stroke each other, very, very gently, making it last…and then be together at the end, which men call the little death.’

  The next day Tom Llewyllyn, Baby’s father and a Fellow of Lancaster College, came over from Cambridge for luncheon.

  ‘How is the old place?’ asked Ptolemaeos.

  ‘Even worse than when you were there.’

  Ptolemaeos had been there in the early sixties.

  ‘Galloping Socialism?’

  ‘Terminal,’ said Tom, with a look of genial displeasure.

  ‘But I thought,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘that you were a Socialist yourself.’

  ‘Poppa was a member of the Labour Party,’ said Baby, fondling her father’s wavy head of hair. ‘He was a great admirer of Major the Earl Attlee…if you take my meaning.’

  ‘And,’ said Tom, ‘of Provost the Lord Constable. Our Provost at this moment. An old Labour man with no nonsense about him, who’s just managed to hold the College together – till now. But now…he’s sixty-five and his time’s up. Lord Constable must pack his traps and leave his lodging. God knows what sort of monster will be put there in his stead.’

  ‘Luncheon is ready,’ said Jo-Jo, who had just come in looking rather sweaty. ‘We must eat it at once or it will spoil.’ She smiled at Baby. ‘Your favourite,’ she said, ‘quenelles of pike with lobster sauce.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Baby. ‘Where on earth did you find the pike?’

  ‘I caught one when I knew you were coming. There’s still a lot of them in these Fen rivers round here.’

  ‘I call that rather grand of you,’ said Canteloupe. ‘Live bait or a spinner?’

  ‘Spinner. It gives you exercise, spinning. I get restless, just sitting there watching a float.’

  ‘It’s a great moment when the float dips,’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘That’s true,’ conceded Jo-Jo; ‘rather like starting to come.’

  ‘What an extraordinary comparison,’ said Canteloupe.

  ‘Not at all. Just think of that…certain moment…when something quivers inside you – like the float in the water – and you feel it’s on its way.’

  ‘Ingenious, I admit. Poetic too. Whatever made you think of it?’

  ‘Love,’ said Baby, ‘that’s what made her think of it. Love, sweet love. God, I could rape those quenelles.’

  ‘But surely,’ Ptolemaeos was saying to Tom Llewyllyn as they sat down, ‘the Statutes of the College provide for Constable’s retirement to be deferred by the Council for a term of up to five years after his sixty-fifth birthday.’

  ‘No one wants to defer it,’ said Tom, ‘except for a few old hands like me. The junior Fellows are red in tooth and claw: the social scientists are on the march in jeans and gym shoes, and Provost Constable, with his hand-made brogues and his tweeds, must cry goodnight “and leave the world for them to bustle in”.’

  ‘How depressing you are,’ said Baby. ‘It’s too bad of you, Poppa, when Jo-Jo’s made this delicious lunch,’ of which she shovelled a huge forkful into her wide, pretty mouth. ‘Now tell me a thing,’ she said, hoovering down her food with a great suck at the same time; ‘Ptoly’s friend Ivan Barraclough – what’s he like?’

  ‘Ask Ptoly.’

  ‘Oh, I have. Ptoly says he’s tough but sensitive, and supplements considerable powers of intuition with immaculate use of reason.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Tom.

  ‘But,’ said Baby, ‘if this Barraclough was at Lancaster with Ptoly, you must have known him too. I’d like a second opinion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Canty and I are going to meet him very soon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For purposes of research,’ Ptolemaeos put in smoothly. ‘Ivan and I have an antiquarian project in which Tullia and Canteloupe are also interested. I too,’ he added, ‘would be glad to know your view of Ivan.’

  ‘I was a married man when the two of you were up,’ said Tom with a discernible note of bitterness. ‘I wasn’t in College very much.’

  ‘But you knew them both,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘because you taught them. Ptoly said so. Tell us what both of them were like.’

  ‘Ptolemaeos was much as he is now: ample in girth and mean in spirit, affable but not amiable, lavish but not generous, furnished with considerable abilities which he exercised in a condescending and dandified but (I am bound to admit) highly effective fashion. In a word, he was, as he doubtless is, a liege man of Belial.’

  Ptolemaeos chuckled. Jo-Jo reddened.

  ‘But he’s lovely,’ she cried. ‘He’s so good at understanding a person.’

  ‘Understanding in order to exploit. This antiquarian project: I’ll wager my weight in gold that he’s using Ivan Barraclough to do all the hard work and using Baby and Canteloupe –’

  ‘Tullia and Canteloupe,’ emended Ptolemaeos mildly.

  ‘– Using Madam and Canteloupe to keep an eye on Ivan in case he tries to claim the loot or the credit, as the case may be.’

  ‘So Barraclough’s that sort of man, is he?’ Baby said. ‘Grabby?’

  ‘Not grabby. He knows his worth and insists on his deserts,’ said Tom. ‘If he thinks Ptolemaeos has not contributed a fair share of effort, he will
deny him any share of the prize.’

  ‘A just man?’ said Baby.

  ‘To the point of obsession.’

  ‘A fanatic?’

  ‘No. There is no emotion here. Justice, with Ivan, is not a matter of passion but of analysis. He himself will do what is right, just as he would avoid errors of logic or syntax – because he feels intellectually obliged. He will work out the factors and the denominators and will proceed as they instruct. And if they instruct him that no share is due to Ptolemaeos, then Ptolemaeos will have a share only over Ivan’s dead body.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘he is well aware of my very substantial contribution, in time, research and, évidemment, finance. It was my network, originally established for purposes of scholarship and enquiry, which traced the course of Xanthippe’s journey from the Mani to Dieppe, and also did most of the groundwork for Ivan’s more particular investigations later on. He will be the first to acknowledge his huge debt to my agents…one of whom, unless I am much mistaken, is approaching Ivan at this very moment.’

  Ivan Barraclough sat in a tavern on the island in the Lake of Ioannina and ate lake trout, which tasted like cotton waste arranged on a framework of barbed wire.

  He had caught the boat from the jetty under the walls of the castle which had been Ali Pasha’s Headquarters and he was now sitting on or near the spot where Ali Pasha once loved to come and dally with his women and his boys. But Ivan’s thoughts were not of Ali Pasha, or not for long: he did indeed reflect on the assassination of that interesting adventurer, which had occurred in the midst of his dainty pleasure and in the precinct of a monastery not a stone’s throw from where Ivan now sat; but having briefly mused on the moral of the incident (that a stiff penis is a wand that waves the Gods themselves into infatuate negligence of their proper business and security), Ivan turned his thoughts to the task which had brought him to the island.

  The Princess Xanthippe, he first reminded himself, had of course never visited Ioannina. She had taken ship, with Hubert of Avallon, a long way south, at Glarentza. Ivan had in fact just come from Glarentza, now called Killini, though there could be no clues there for him as the place had been twice destroyed, by Constantine Palaeologue in the fifteenth century and by the Germans in the twentieth. Even so, however, he had decided that a courtesy visit to the little harbour town could do no harm, and he had taken the opportunity to walk in the handsome nearby Castle of Chlemoutsi (or Clermont) which is sometimes confused with Glarentza (or Clarence) and at which, he supposed, Xanthippe just might have been lodged for a night or two while waiting to take ship. But he caught no whiff of her ghost there, nor had he seriously expected to; and he now decided that he must finally accept, as the most he could ever know about this stage in her journey, the bald statement of Hubert – that the Despoina had been duly delivered to him by Lord Geoffery de Bruyère at the port of Glarentza and that ‘with present exigence’ he had taken her on board and bade the master set sail for Corfu.

  So Xanthippe had sailed away to Corfu, and Ivan for his part now motored to Ioannina, which lay on the way to Igoumenitza and the Corfu ferry. But he had business in Ioannina beyond mere transit. For although Xanthippe herself had never been there, she had received a gift which came thence – a gift from this very island.

  Ioannina, during the Frankish rule of Romany, had remained in Greek hands and had been a popular place of refuge or passage for Greeks from Constantinople or the Morea. To Ioannina from Byzantium in 1255 came the Thessalian-born Necromancer Aristarchos of Veroia, on his way to investigate the ancient oracle of the dead at Ephyra, where Cocytos merges with Acheron. Aristarchos had heard from a colleague, who had for a time been a refugee in Ioannina, that there was to be found on the island in the lake there a rare herb of which the fragrance had strong appeal for spirits such as he, Aristarchos, might encounter at Ephyra; and he therefore broke his journey at Ioannina to gather some of this little known and valuable flora.

  Aristarchos, being sage and scientist as well as magician, suspected, from the description which he had been given of it, that the herb was a Convolvulus variant listed by Leon of Argos in his ‘Aνθη‘Ελληνιχα (Flowers of Greece) Chamaetisos Hyptios. Since this was not known to possess anything much by way of fragrance (of appeal whether to dead or to quick) Aristarchos inferred that if his informant had been speaking the truth the herb to be found on the island must be a special sub-variant of the variant; and this indeed he discovered to be the case. Chamaetisos Hyptios Spanopouloēdes (his extended version of the name) had a narrower and more sharply pointed leaf than plain Chamaetisos Hyptios, and a pinker flower. It also had a pronounced fragrance, displeasing to his own nostrils but, for all he knew, delectable to ghosts; while the leaves, as he elicited by ingenious experiment, contained a zestful sap which had various and powerful effects on physiological and cerebral function, the variations depending on the manner in which the leaf or its sap were administered, i.e. by whom and to whom. When the leaf dried, it retained its flavour if chewed, and it could be preserved, if carefully put up, for months and even for years. What was more, the effects on the human body, mind and (as Aristarchos believed) soul or spirit, were just as powerful when the leaf was taken or administered in its dried and preserved form as when it was applied fresh. Although the actual chemistry remained obscure to Aristarchos, of the herb’s therapeutic (and other) potential there could be no question: Chamaetisos Hyptios Spanopouloèdes had certainly merited the detour.

  The authority for all this, Ivan knew, was what Ptolemaeos and he used to call ‘The Special Appendix’ of Hubert’s Chronicle. According to this, Aristarchos went on his way from Ioannina to Ephyra, conducted his investigation there (with what degree of satisfaction or success was not related), then took ship from nearby Previsa to Corfu, where he wished to inform himself about a particularly ferocious cult of Artemis-Hecate which had flourished in a temple near the Capital during the sixth century BC.

  In Corfu, by sheer chance, Aristarchos had encountered Xanthippe and Hubert, who were staying there while Hubert pondered an alternative route to bypass plague-ridden Venice. As soon as Aristarchos had clapped eye on Xanthippe he had obviously received the kind of impression that certain others had already received in the course of her journey. But his reactions were those of a man well versed and trained in these matters: as far as Aristarchos was concerned there was neither moral scruple nor religious aversion, there was merely professional interest. ‘He was long closeted with my Lady,’ stated Hubert in the Special Appendix, ‘who was attended by two of her hand-maidens to ensure that all intercourse might be virtuous.’ It later appeared that Aristarchos had done a deal with Xanthippe: in return for a full account of ‘her condition, vision and possession’ Aristarchos had given her a quantity of the herb from Ioannina, with the remark that ‘being situate as she was, the Lady might well find use for it ere long’. A few days later Hubert and Xanthippe had sailed from Corfu for Bari; neither of them ever saw Aristarchos again.

  There had been some problem, Ivan remembered now, about how to preserve the herb in good condition. Aristarchos himself kept the dried flowers in an airtight phylactery. Xanthippe owned nothing similar, but decided that a small onyx box in which she used to carry sweetmeats –

  ‘Good afternoon, Kyrie Barraclough,’ said an obese Greek in a slick blue suit and winkle-picking shoes. ‘“The Iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattered her poppy.”’

  ‘“Man is a noble animal,”’ rejoindered Ivan, completing the agreed code, ‘“splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.” Please do sit down, Kyrie. Some refreshment?’

  ‘Café Grecos, if I may. Sweet.’ And after Ivan had ordered this, ‘You found our trout to your liking?’

  ‘Lacking in savour.’

  ‘Ah. You should have tried the écrevisses. They abound in this lake.’

  ‘I find the shells too annoying.’

  The Greek inclined his head in polite acceptance of this sentiment and fondled the coffee c
up which had just been set before him:

  ‘I have two messages for you,’ he said, ‘from the Fat Pharaoh of the Fens.’

  Not for the first time, Ivan wondered why Ptolemaeos insisted on these infantile rigmaroles. Perhaps it was to reassure the Greeks, who liked devious methods and suspected simplicity. But then not only the Greeks but all other of Ptolemaeos’ agents had to use these absurd and arcane formulae. Perhaps, thought Ivan, he makes us do it because the continued use of an imbecile nursery idiom is, after all, an anodyne, and serves to ease one’s spirit and soothe one’s nerves in face of the really rather hideous concepts which underlie this whole affair.

  ‘How says His Divinity?’ he said now, observing the prescribed form.

  ‘The news from France is good,’ said the Messenger, on whom, once the introductory code had been got through, precision was strictly enjoined. ‘The Marquis des Veules-les-Roses is convinced that no attempt will be made, for many weeks at least, to interfere with the Castle. You are therefore to proceed absolutely as planned, and to be at the inn in Saint-Gilles six days from now. Which brings me to my second item: the other Marquis, the English one, will be meeting you there with his wife as previously arranged.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ivan.

  But in truth he did not see. Ptoly’s rule was that established arrangements and conditions should not be repeated, confirmed or even referred to: only if they had to be changed should they be the subject of messages or discussion. Now here was this Greek, who had sought him out with expense and difficulty, merely telling him what he very well knew already, i.e. that restorations to the Castle of Arques-la-Bataille had been indefinitely postponed and that he was to meet Lord and Lady Canteloupe at Saint-Gilles according to schedule. The repetition was quite pointless: Ptoly must have had some other reason for ordering the man to come to him.

  ‘I see,’ he said again. ‘And does the Divinity vouchsafe no other message?’

  The Messenger frowned. He looked puzzled, dissatisfied, uneasy.